


he's got a mind like a sewer and a heart like a fridge

by StripySock



Category: American Psycho - All Media Types
Genre: Canon-Typical Behavior, Canon-Typical Food Descriptions, Canon-Typical Violence, Inappropriate Humor, M/M, Recreational Drug Use, Treat, Violent Thoughts, film canon, offscreen murder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-08
Updated: 2020-08-08
Packaged: 2021-03-04 22:54:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,732
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25444264
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StripySock/pseuds/StripySock
Summary: “You’re buying,” Patrick says,  a grudging concession. There’s a neat little flicker and a platinum card in Marcus’s hand.“Correction. The company is buying. Having Amex on speed is like a direct line to God. Let’s take a little advantage.”
Relationships: Patrick Bateman/Marcus Halberstram
Comments: 19
Kudos: 28
Collections: Rare Male Slash Exchange 2020





	he's got a mind like a sewer and a heart like a fridge

**Author's Note:**

  * For [asuralucier](https://archiveofourown.org/users/asuralucier/gifts).



> Written as a treat for your delightful American Psycho prompt, I hope you enjoy.
> 
> Title borrowed from Elvis Costello. It'll make sense later.
> 
> Huge thanks to ictus who did a superb job betaing this - much appreciated.

Tom Cruise owns the penthouse of West 81 Garden Building. It would be a little too much to say he lives there, maybe he just drops by for the 4th of July - Patrick endures repeating this joke and receiving the same mindless baying sniggers that he usually reaps. On the other hand, Patrick does live there, and now according to a discreet little brass button, so does Marcus Halberstram. The button installs itself before Marcus does, a poised arrangement of Xeryus by Givenchy - a crude amber bloom of scent - too crisp shirts, and a life only half moved in. 

The first time they run into each other in the lobby, Patrick has to work to keep the distaste off his face when Marcus invites him around. Marcus doesn’t belong here, not where Patrick has tracked perfect precise footprints in blood and watched an uncomplaining janitor mop them up behind him. Marcus is a pollutant of sacred ground, of the neutral space that exists between Patrick’s apartment and his office. The worst of his sins is that he’s insistent, Patrick needs to come round and give Marcus the benefit of his taste as Marcus moves in and makes the space his own. He says that with almost no irony at all.

It’s a Saturday when Patrick finally agrees, after two run-ins with Marcus in the foyer at home and the fifth floor conference room at work, and he’s had a little time to consider how he’ll kill Marcus. The balcony features heavily, a fantasy of defenestration, and the mute choked sounds Marcus might make as he hits the ground at a velocity that guarantees the doorman will throw up on seeing his remains.

They’re just one drink in and they’ve already had a disagreement, a polite debate on Ralph Lauren vs Calvin Klein vis-à-vis underwear, and Marcus has excused himself to the kitchen to hunt for something he vaguely called ‘a little special’. Patrick is unsurprised to know that Marcus is on the wrong side of sartorial history and also incapable of properly entertaining. 

The platter Marcus has prepared for the evening is neat, a spread of stuffed pimento olives, sun-dried tomatoes, crudités, a little prosciutto, and the knife he's used is perfect, a gleaming Sabatier steel blade. Patrick wants to know what it'll feel like in his hand as he guts Marcus with it. At that price, it’d better have precision balance, sharp enough to fillet something slipperier than beef.

The vodka however is Grey Goose, disappointing. Patrick expected better from Marcus. The glass is chilled though, the olive fresh, the texture firm between his teeth, and he rolls it around consideringly. He can already picture what Marcus will look like on the floor. It needs to be neat, he tells himself, a killing as slick as the too sharp part in Marcus's hair. He can feel a little hardness now. Interesting. Could be the drink, or it could be the thought of Marcus, crawling across broken glass, apologizing for his shitty subpar vodka, before Patrick exerts the little mercy left in him and puts an end to the whimpering. Definite dick responsiveness.

There's a crooning moment in From a Whisper to a Scream, an underrated 1981 song by the seminal Elvis Costello, and the distinct sound of plastic uncurling in the space between notes, a sound Patrick knows intimately, that hardens his dick even more. It's the sound of a killer preparing for a messy little death. Patrick can feel his heart break into a faster beat, catches his own eye in the hard shine of the CD cases, smooths back a stray hair and bares his teeth at himself, a pseudo smile. Time to play. Only, before he can make it to the last supper platter, Marcus is back, and Patrick knows with everything in him, knows by an intimate tug of the gut, that Marcus is holding the soul-twin of the Sabatier knife behind his back. 

It takes Patrick about seven seconds to excuse himself back to his own apartment, Marcus following him with a look that screams frustrated energy, good enough to bottle and sell to harassed account managers working on a 5am-11pm schedule. Patrick could laugh at the clumsiness of it all.

Patrick thinks best in the shower, three layers deep in anti-ageing serum and a lemon balm body wash that rejuvenates and restores the delicate cellular structure of his body. There’s something about the way the water batters his skin that brings a certain clarity to what he has to consider, given the instinctive knowledge of Marcus’s intended acquisition of the Patrick Bateman brand. There’s no space for Marcus in Patrick’s equations, he’s not a quants geek masturbating over all given variables. There’s nowhere that Marcus can exist that isn’t an infringement. 

(Afterwards he acknowledges if only to himself, he’s not surprised that when he leaves the shower Marcus is there, though he is perhaps a little surprised at the ease with which Marcus pins him.)

In the moment though, there's a smear on the mirror. It's Biologique Recherche. 91 dollars a bottle and it's smeared up and down the mirror, like it's some no-name brand bought by a suburban middle manager aspiring to a Men's Health vision. Patrick begrudges this more than he begrudges the way that Marcus Halberstram holds his wrists behind his back and makes him breathe in his own damp breath. The shower pours steam into the room still, wisps of it curling around him. If Patrick looks to the left, just a little, the cut of his own jaw could fool him into thinking that he's been held down by someone he could respect for doing it. Marcus thrusts against him, body on body.

When Patrick offers the sort of protest that belongs to the man Patrick Bateman pretends to be, Marcus just puts a hand in the small of his back and pushes, until Patrick's face to face with himself, too close to see detail beyond his own startled eye. The flat glass under his cheek is familiar and cool, like a gel mask straight from the icebox, reducing puffiness and soothing his skin. His mouth touches it's own reflection, a slippery slide. He tastes like glass, flat and cool and empty under an exploratory lick, faintest trace of sweat from where Marcus had banged his head against it the first time. It’s latent instinct that snaps his head back, knee bent against the wall for stability and balance. 

There's an empty silence knocking around inside Patrick’s head, punctured only by the sound of the savage smack of the back of his head connecting with Marcus's designer face. He thinks there's a crunch of Oliver People glasses as well, and he wonders if they share the same prescription. There’s the merest whiff of Creed’s Chevrefeuille in the air - hint of honeysuckle, fading into an ambergris finish, green and fresh but the silage isn’t strong enough to dominate, and underneath that there’s just a little tinge of iron.

Patrick lashes back with an elbow, meets something soft, then Marcus is stumbling forward and pushing him against the wall through sheer body weight, and Patrick can taste blood where a tooth has cut the inside of his lip, and it enrages him, he loses slippery control, and pushes back so hard that Marcus stumbles and falls. There’s nothing in the room big enough to brain him with and Patrick’s dignity is in tatters, and he’s half way to hard from it, greatest insult of them all. 

There’s blood smeared on Marcus’s face, a cut on his cheekbone slowly running, a hardening crust of it under his nose, which looks unbroken. Marcus looks like he wants to laugh as he partially drags himself up by the heated towel-rail and holds his hands up, palms turned outwards - half French reservist and half Jesus. “Fuck Bateman,” he says. “You can fight.” Like some misplaced too-late admiration is going to stop Patrick from disembowelling him when he gets the chance.

There’s a raw spot where he’s cut the inside of his lip against his own teeth, can feel the blood mix with his saliva, debates whether to spit on the floor but instead swallows it back. The mixture trickles down his throat as he takes a towel from the warm rail and pats it against his face, little circular motions to absorb the sweat while taking care not to aggravate the pores, as he thinks what he’s going to do next. There’s enough steel in his drawers to pin Marcus to wherever he wants him, but Marcus is shifting, now almost entirely standing. 

“You know,” Marcus says, wipes blood from his face across his arm, leaves a little red trail. “I’ve a reservation at Indochine. You want to go?”

Mostly, Patrick wants to pin him to the bed and see if Marcus will make the same soft broken sounds as Cindy, this time on top of plastic wrap so Patrick doesn’t have to worry about whether blood will wash out of a thousand thread count sheets, but _Indochine._ They’re doing that salmon dish Courtney was raving about, the one with the drizzle of truffle spiked campari sauce that came with turmeric dusted polenta slivers and a raspberry/pepper dipping sauce. The one she’d shivered and crossed her legs at. “Like Jesus coming down my throat,” she’d said, and she took enough dope that he could believe she’d know. He can’t get a reservation there for love, money or drugs, and it’s bad enough that he thinks he might be blackballed.

Marcus seems to sense his hesitation, a miniature shark swimming in new waters. “I know the maître d’. He’ll hook us up with the best table, even better coke.” 

“You’re buying,” Patrick says, a grudging concession. There’s a neat little flicker and a platinum card in Marcus’s hand. 

“Correction. The _company_ is buying. Having Amex on speed is like a direct line to God. Let’s take a little advantage.”

Marcus’s fully standing now, holding the shattered remnants of his glasses in his hand. “I’ll have to swing by my old place for another pair,” he says, a little rueful shrug as though this was a natural segue to the evening. “Only half of my things have been moved in.” 

Patrick wouldn’t offer a solution to world peace even if he could - that would be legitimizing the spineless hippy fucks aiming to send Kumbaya to No 1 on the charts, and depriving bomb makers in Iran of an honest living. But this he can do, and a dose of re-education at the same time. He opens up the top drawer of his closet and surveys the neat rows of underwear folded into a crisp rectangle by the hand of some unknown dry cleaner. “You can have these,” he says. Calvin Klein will probably relish the chance to be face-to-ass with Marcus. He imagines Marcus’s dick nestling into a tight space that only Patrick has ever known, feels a little stir in his gut though he can’t quite tell if it’s arousal or gas.

Patrick rolls out the bottom drawer as well where fourteen pairs of glasses nestle in together, legs folded up and crossed, tight and virgin. He takes the glasses out, Persol tortoise frames, retailing at $289 a pair, spring hinge not yet an industry standard. “Try them on for size.” 

They fit Marcus like they were made for him, prescription and frames both. He puts them on, and like some obscene mirror, they’re reflected across the room at each other, looking at life through the same lens. 

Patrick gets a little closer, settles the glasses more carefully on Marcus's nose, pushes them up the bridge until they sit just right. Marcus is looking at him through them, steady-eyed despite the blood smeared under his nose. They’re eye to eye, precisely the same height, and Patrick can see absolutely nothing behind those empty eyes. 

“Get the fuck dressed,” Patrick says. “We’ve got a reservation to get to.”

Marcus hadn’t lied about the maître d’. They were kept waiting at the waiter’s lectern for mere seconds, Patrick in a reliable Valentino, Marcus in a seasonal Armani, so cutting edge it was double breasted, wide stretch of shirt accentuating and even outright creating broad shoulders, alarmingly tailored to within an inch of its life. It’s almost as terrifying as the Cecilia Metheny Patrick’d made him change out of, and close on the heels of the Ermenegildo Zegna **.** Whatever twist of the universe had brought this to pass, Patrick wasn’t eating at the same table in a man who thought a silk shawl collar was an acceptable suiting statement. If he flares his nostrils, he can catch a whiff of Penhaglion, the fading woody finish. The blood’s been washed off now, but it remains a base note.

The table they’re next to isn’t as ideal as it could be. There's a prick who trades at Goldman Sachs accidentally dipping his double-cuff in the caper vinaigrette as he tries and fails to light a cigarette for the bored blonde across from him. Patrick imagines him with a chef’s knife in his gut, six inches of polished olive wood protruding, bares his teeth at the pair of them in something that could almost be a smile when she asks him for a light instead. Can feel her exhale on his fingers, all too obvious, when the stupid cow should be inhaling to catch a spark. Her caviar and scallop ceviche with the drizzle of blended brie and lemongrass is untouched, her fifth martini is empty, and her evening as she’s making clear, is open. She’s wearing a subtle Stéphanie citrus scent with a heart of myrrh, and it’s clashing with the fish. 

When Patrick gives her the brush off and turns back to the salmon appetizer, Marcus is tapping his fingers idly on the table, looks sideways across it at Patrick, glances down at his chest. "Gucci?" he asks, nodding towards the tie.

“If you have to ask,” Patrick says, just dry enough that it could be a joke even though it isn’t.

Marcus looks vaguely amused as though Patrick’s said something he finds interesting. “You finished giving your spoon the Linda Lovelace treatment?” He taps his top pocket with two fingers.

On the way to the bathroom, an older woman gives them a look that says as far as she’s concerned, the management ought to throw them out for indecency, eyes moving between them both like she’s at fucking Wimbledon. She’s dressed in the sort of pearls that means she’ll be stepping directly into a Rolls at the end of the night, or else Patrick would consider waiting outside for her with a solid ten inches of steel to prove he isn’t whatever the fuck she thinks he is. He bets he could get her to retract in five seconds, maybe three.

The bathroom attendant doesn’t look twice or say a word as they squeeze into a more than spacious stall decorated in a salmon color Patrick last saw on his plate three minutes ago. 

It turns out to be handy in the end that the back of Patrick's head hadn't broken Marcus's nose, as Marcus needs it for the coke he's neatly cut and is currently preparing to snort off the marble countertop in the bathroom. Marcus's taste in cocaine is far superior to his taste in vodka, smoothest ride Patrick's had in weeks, hits his bloodstream like a brick. Patrick reaches out and adjusts the glasses he's lent Marcus, pushes them further up his nose until the bridge of the borrowed frames presses white into his skin. Marcus is watching him through them the whole time, pupils huge in the semi-dark of the stall, swallowing up the color of his iris until it’s just a disconcerting puddle of blackness. There’s an indent in his mouth where his teeth are biting down, and his nostrils flare as he bends down to snort the rest of his share.

When he comes back to eye level, he’s lit up like a fucking candle. 

"Hold on," says Marcus, "you got a little something," and his fingers are swiping briefly at the bottom of Patrick's nose, touch making him shiver, feather light, unsettling leap in his stomach. The look on Marcus’s face is nothing he can identify, nothing he wants to probe.

When they exit the bathroom attendant is nowhere to be seen and Marcus takes a fabric napkin from the basket and uses it to scoop up a urinal cake from the bottom of one of the urinals, like some sort of fucking animal. He then folds it, before dropping it on the counter and washing his hands. 

Patrick can feel the world bright and sharp around him, and this bullshit is a waste of coke, he opens up to ask what the hell. But Marcus is already shouldering his way through the door carrying it with him, and as he walks past Pearls-and-Chanel, he drops it smoothly, unobtrusively into her Hermes bag. 

The problem with dropping coke half way through the main course is that Patrick doesn’t want the rest of the food. The simple duck à l’dragonfruit holds no attraction anymore, not even with the frankly masterful addition of the peppered thyme coulis paired with an unobtrusive little Abbazia di Novacella Sauvignon. He balls up his napkin and tosses it on the table five seconds after he’s sat down, presses convulsively at the side of his mouth. 

Marcus is kicked back in his chair, paying absolutely no attention to his now cold deconstructed retrique chicken glazed with coffee aspic, though he’s idly playing with the cinnamon stick it was served with, his leg twitching under the table, until he stands and flings his card at some unsuspecting waiter who opens his mouth to protest and then clearly thinks the better of it. “This place is dead,” he says to Patrick. “Dead from the fucking ankles up.” 

Somewhere in the corner a wonk from Billing is trying to get their attention. Patrick stands up as well. “Lucidia,” he offers. Hottest bar slash club of the last forty eight hours. Evelyn had told him about it over the phone, something about how the go-go dancers really screwed, the censure in her voice underlaid with a little kick of interest. They’re all as bored as each other these days, an incestuous little city crushing the life out of them. More smoke and mirrors bullshit, but it’s somewhere to go, somewhere to kill time between now and killing time.

Marcus shrugs. “Fine by me,” he says and takes back his card, leans in a little. “Maybe the DJ will play The Supremes. That’s your jam right?” Patrick looks at him, closely. Takes in the little flicker of a platinum Amex back in a pocket, the glint of a sub-par Patek Phillipe on his wrist, trace of a smirk on his punched mouth. Fucking asshole.

The taxi driver ignores them, stays stone-faced as they do another line in the back of his cab, and fiddles with the air freshener when he accidentally catches Patrick’s eye. All New York cab drivers are the same, Patrick thinks, they smell danger even when it comes in Valentino and red braces. When he gets out, he snaps at the air to see him flinch. 

The bartender is young, hot, and he’s seen her or her type before at some other club. She gives him a dead-eyed, fish-faced stare as she shakes a shitty martini for him and a lethal Harvey Wallbanger for Marcus. He leaves a one cent tip and a mouthed fuck you, and Marcus is looking at him in a way even murder hadn’t elicited. Fucked priorities, from Patrick’s considered point of view. 

“You think you’d get better service if you tipped?” Some greasy idiot with a flower in his lapel, a too loud Etro Vetiver polluting the air around them, and a face that Patrick vaguely recognizes from Forbes 30 is showing off for the bartender who is already turning away, bored of them all. 

Patrick’s made a living off not looking nonplussed at stupid pricks making bad calls, but he’s off the clock. “What kind of a fucking sad sack goes to the same club twice in three months?”

Marcus raises a glass to that, tips back the poisonous looking juice, Galliano and vodka mix in one long smooth movement. “They should call this a Harvey Wallstreet instead you know,” Marcus says, loud over the sound of New York’s newest one-second sensation. “They both fuck you good.”

“You just open your throat and let them in right?” It’s an easy set-up.

The strobe lightning is just enough to let him see Marcus grin, lips pulling back from his teeth like it really was that funny. He’s not wearing a tie anymore, it’s slithered into a pocket somewhere and there’s sweat in the hollow of his throat where his shirt’s opened just a little to reveal it, coke going to town on his nervous system. Patrick feels damp around the ears, the back of the neck, and he needs something more. Faster than a drink, better than a bump, wants to put his teeth to Marcus’s throat and gnaw through until he gets to the other side, Marcus opening up helplessly underneath him, a parting of the skin and the ways. 

He catches Marcus’s eye and Marcus is still laughing. “You look like Luis does when he sees you in Valentino with the red tie.”

Marcus has been watching, that much is clear, and Patrick wonders for how long. A thought occurs to him, a snail-slip down his spine, quenching what could pass for arousal. “You haven’t _touched_ Luis have you?” The thought is abhorrent, second hand contamination from Luis’s pitiful, desperate eagerness.

Marcus hasn’t stopped laughing. “Wouldn’t touch him with your dick.” He looks closer, even though he hasn’t moved, shoulder still cocked and solid against the wall. When he touches the back of Patrick’s neck, his fingers slide off until they hit his collar, hook in there for a brief second, manicured nails a dent of pressure on skin. Patrick thinks about the sharp thin cracks of sound they’d make if he broke them one by one. Marcus uses his fingers to turn Patrick’s head, presses them directly in his neck until he’s staring at the bar, at the Forbes loser who hasn’t figured out that the world doesn’t work in code. Takes his hand away, leaves Patrick cold for a second even through the coke-sweat.

“Back in a second,” Marcus says, and he’s back at the bar, tossing a conversation starter to the guy, and a request to the bartender, who shakes up a couple more drinks while maintaining a look of faintly malevolent boredom. Her clone is working the other end of the bar, it’s a quiet night, should’ve known better than to take note of somewhere based on Evelyn’s prurience. 

The drink when it comes tastes like shit. _Singapore sling,_ the part of Patrick’s mind that’s always thinking supplies, though it’s barely recognizable, a swampy combination of gin and sour mix, a heavy puddle of too-sweet Grenadine in the backwash. Marcus swaps drinks, slippery nudge of his fingers on the back of Patrick’s hand, slick from the condensation on the glasses, and the flavor resolves into something drinkable, same component parts, different proportions.

“I’ve two talents,” Marcus says apropos of nothing. 

“Just two? Does sucking off Winderstall for the big name portfolios not count?” Patrick replies, and licks away the taste of grenadine from where it clings to the inside of his mouth. 

“Cute,” Marcus says. “Wrong, but cute. Keep talking about my mouth Bateman and I might start to think you mean it. Two talents. I can get a good drink anywhere and I always, and I mean always, fucking close my deals.”

“Merge and acquire,” Patrick says, holds up his glass and Marcus taps on it with his own.

“That geek at the bar. That’s Lukas. Originally from Montana, fresh in from Hong Kong. Works on desk at Cantor, used to finetune shit at Citadel. He can’t figure out how you pick up girls in a city like New York, reckon he got used to buying them. Told him we know somewhere hot. What you think?”

There’s cold glass sliding under Patrick’s face, Grey Goose in his stomach, and Marcus is behind him, knee heavy in his back. Somewhere, plastic crackles and unwraps. They started this evening one way, and they’re going to end it like it should’ve been: a body on the floor. Somewhere between the coke and the drink, he’d semi-forgotten that Marcus knows knives as well. 

“Not my type,” Patrick says, it’s half true. Before there’d been Cindy and the rest, there’d been Paul Owen, or someone who looked like Paul Owen, the faces all start to blend together in his head. Mostly though, there’s an itch in his back teeth at the idea of Marcus picking someone out. This is Patrick’s fucking show, Patrick’s fucking city. Marcus is kicking in on his turf.

“You’re a fucking pussy Bateman,” Marcus says, calm and clear, cutting through the grinding synth. “Who you going to pick instead? You an only child, never learnt how to share? Can’t handle a man?”

“Jesus Christ, no need to put it like that,” Patrick spits out. Somewhere at the bar Lukas from Cantor turns to look at them, and raises a glass like he’s forgotten how they first met. 

“Yeah, yeah, you have a brother I forgot,” Marcus says, skidding past the point with ease. 

In the end, after another three drinks, Lukas from Cantor is disappointingly easy. Marcus is hot for the kill in a way that Patrick hasn’t seen in himself since the first time, like he’s forever been chasing the same high, hunting the same dragon. He can’t even wait to get the prick in a cab, walks him a hundred meters, down an alley and does him on the floor while Patrick watches and jumps back to avoid the worst of it. 

“You’re a fucking asshole,” Patrick says afterwards, as they pull garbage bags in to cover the detritus. “These are three hundred fucking dollar shoes, you could be a little careful.” There’s a splash of blood on the instep, Jesus, he’s a messy killer. Patrick wants to smash through the expensive smirk Marcus is wearing, teeth that daddy bought, scatter them all over the sidewalk and watch Marcus try to pick them up with his bloodied mouth. 

“They’re hideous,” Marcus says. “Like the guys in the office? They laugh at them. Slip on Sam, they call you. Or jerk off king ‘cause you keep the blinds down all the time.” 

Marcus is wearing Patrick’s glasses, Patrick’s underwear, he could stroll in Monday and take Patrick’s wheeled carbon-framed throne and none of them, _none_ of them would ever know the difference. The flip side of it is that he’s no-one. He’s the undistinguished voice on the other end of the voice mail, trailing indifferently off into the sunset and Patrick’s kind of turned on by that. Gives him a dick-twitch to think no-one’s coming looking for Marcus’s body.

“They don’t call me slip on Sam,” Patrick says. “They call Smith that.”

Marcus shrugs, utterly indifferent. “What’s the difference right?”

“Whatever, these shoes are fucking ruined. You happy?”

“Ecstatic,” and the way that Marcus says it, is almost like he means it, makes Patrick profoundly uncomfortable, because Marcus being happy is a bad thing. The only things that make Marcus happy are the FTSE taking a shit on the FT, bluefin tuna sashimi with ketchup, and judging by the evening, smearing fucking hooker blood on Patrick’s Brooks Brothers loafers, and all of those things make him a prime candidate for being gutted like a pig.

As they walk down the street, Patrick looks to the left, sees the shadowed curve of Marcus’s face, feet in perfect tandem as they strike the pavement. 

“You even fucking real?” he says, doesn’t know if it’s the coke residue, the vodka or plain bad sense speaking. Marcus doesn’t feel real, he feels like something that’s climbed out of a torn hole in Wall Street’s head, nightmare made flesh. Like something created out of the discards of Patrick’s waking dreams, the same sense of unreality clinging to him that every day at the office invokes.

Marcus shoulders him into brick, hits the wall with the front of his head, turns his face in against Patrick’s neck on the rebound, slippery lick against his skin. “You’re a psycho, you know that? Am I real? Does it feel like I’m not?” He’s grinding against Patrick’s thigh, and there’s a shudder of distaste running down Patrick’s spine, all mixed up with a thread of heat in his gut. He’s made a new practice of not lying to himself about what he wants lately, he just doesn’t even know if he wants this. His cock’s saying yes, his brain’s saying fuck no, and the animal instinct at the base of his neck, the one that raises hair at the sight of cops, is screaming danger in a way that’s feedbacking on a closed loop straight back to his dick.

This is fucking sick, it’s savage, and it’s running through him, firing up neurons that feel like they’re fresh out of their packaging. But it doesn’t feel unreal anymore. It doesn’t feel like anything he’s felt in a long time, mostly because he _can_ feel it. He gets a hand in Marcus’s hair, just a little too long, he needs to fire that stylist, Patrick thinks, and yanks it back, grinds his thigh up for good measure. Marcus isn’t fighting to get away, he’s pushing back into it, half interesting, half disappointing to the part of Patrick’s brain that’s become finely attuned to a prey drive. 

Lately, he can’t deny it: sex takes work. It takes more things, better things, hotter things to turn him on. A girl, two girls, steel pliers with the needle grip nose, a video camera here, a chainsaw there, pillows deep enough to hold a face into. Marcus shouldn’t even make it onto the spectrum, men never have. Patrick has never been less turned on than he was by Luis Carruthers even with the crying, even with the knowledge that it’d be less effort than he’s ever spent for a fuck before. Hell he could’ve snapped Luis’s neck mid blowjob and Luis would still have died happy. Even that didn’t make it worth it. 

So Marcus shouldn’t make his dick hard in the slightest. He isn’t wired that way. Whatever is broken in his brain, it didn’t bend in that direction. But his body doesn’t seem to know that. Marcus reminds him of something, something buried deep, six inches deep and bloody inside himself. There’s this smell in Marcus’s hair and it could be Basile Uomo, because Patrick recognizes the distinctive top-note of juniper, poison-wood tree, the base of musk, and underneath it all, buried between moss and amber, the faintest hint of rot.

He feels the ache of it start in his jaw, the need to crush something between his teeth and hear it whimper, the throb of it in a lockstep pattern with the ragged thump of an almost unhearable heart. Marcus’s face is mostly shadow, there’s a sharp slice of sodium light across his rumpled Armani suit and he’s walking his fingers deliberately up Patrick’s arm like he has no fear of death. Patrick watches them in the glare of New York’s pseudo moonlight, until they press into the hinge of his jaw, right where the ache to destroy starts every time, fits his fingerprints into where he’d touched when he angled Patrick’s face towards the kill. 

“Want to find out where cheap dates go when they die?” Patrick asks.

“You could have just said it’s time to go home,” Marcus replies. 

There’s a misstep before they get the show on the road when they’re back in the Garden Building. Certain of the items Patrick owns in themselves could possibly constitute an obscene flouting of the Geneva convention, and he would feel more comfortable if he had them to hand, even if he still isn’t sure exactly what he plans to do with, or rather, to Marcus. Marcus, he is fairly certain, whatever he is, whoever he is, spit-shine polished nightmare or not, has not had the chance to acquire a similar range of instrumentation. 

Patrick watches the flex of Marcus’s arm as he unlocks the door, considers how Marcus had struggled to pin him in the bathroom. It’s an even match, but he thinks he can take it without the home advantage, and he’s fed up with mopping up blood from his own floors. 

Marcus heads straight to the bedroom. Patrick paces into the living room, looks at the red curled edges of the prosciutto left too long in the air, rifles through Marcus’s kitchen until he finds a semi-decent Scotch, casked Laphroaig, pours a couple of glasses and follows him in. 

"How's the Chase portfolio working out for you?" Patrick says, for lack of anything better. Watches Marcus take his tie out of his pocket and wind it on a teak hanger, a little silken noose around another unfeeling neck.

“Chase is as fucked as Lehman, and the pair of them are having a threesome with Fannie Mae. The Great Bank Fuck of ‘89. History is written by the winners, Bush’s gonna have writer’s cramp in his jerk off hand.”

“Awesome,” Patrick says, bored already, takes a sip from the scotch, and has a brief flash of throwing the liquid in Marcus’s face, smashing the glass by driving it upwards underneath his jaw, like a sense memory of something that never happened. It’s almost a surprise that he’s still holding the glass. Marcus turns back and takes one of them, clinks it against the other, knocks it back and drops the glass. It rolls a little over the carpet.

Marcus isn’t as neat as Patrick when it comes to the disposal of his clothes, but they remove their glasses at exactly the same time. There’s a moment of utter stillness when it really comes to it. Patrick is proud of his body, aware of the impression it makes. The flaws in it are ones that only he can see. But naked like this, exposed in every way, activates a deep primal instinct that he hasn’t felt in a long time. It takes a while to pinpoint it as a little offshoot of fear. 

Marcus takes the initiative, and the next thought in Patrick’s mind as he half reclines, is half pushed down on the bed is, _Jesus's he's sucking my cock_ , his fingers rumpling what Patrick recognizes just by touch is a Kenzo bedlinen set in cobalt trim that deserves better treatment. Patrick sits back up, thrown off balance for the first time in what feels like months, a quick punch of uncertainty. It's wrong, glaringly wrong, and he can't take his eyes away from the sight, from the tingle of bone deep fear evoked by the sight of a predator on his knees with his teeth so close, up too close and personal - one wrong move and he’ll be castrated, a bigger laughing stock in the office than happily married Andy Yorke who considers strippers to be cheating on his wife.

“Oh _Patrick_ ,” Marcus says, pulling off from a deeply unsatisfactory semi attempt at deepthroating, and there’s a tilt to his accent that takes Patrick a second to clock, until he realizes that the bastard is channeling Luis. Marcus sees it the second when Patrick realizes, laughs like he might be dying, and Patrick gets a hand in his hair to pull him down and shut the sound up.

Marcus recovers fast, sucks for a mediocre second longer, then stands up and slides his fingers into Patrick’s mouth, unconcerned with the straightforward reciprocal danger of Patrick’s teeth. Marcus presses down on Patrick’s tongue, slides his fingers between the slick gap of his teeth and his cheek, drags them out and across Patrick’s face, wet smear of it already drying, instinct strong in Patrick to gnaw and bite and he doesn’t, only because he wants to know what’s next. Scrambles past him onto the bed and lies back, like he does this on the regular, space between his thighs for Patrick, dick hard against his stomach, sticky just from what little they’ve done. Marcus, it seems, isn’t having trouble keeping it up.

Christ, Marcus’s room is perfect for this, and it sparks a little flare of annoyance in Patrick’s gut at the falling down of his own interior decorator. There’s mirrors on two sides, one tilted down on a dressing table just enough that he can see the angle of his cock slide between Marcus’s thighs at first, wet head of it just glimpsed on the other side. When Patrick gets the angle right, the sight hollows out his gut with something he can’t quantify. From here he can see the cut of his deltoid, it needs a little time, a little more definition but looks like the calisthenics classes have been working out. He gets a little kick from that, more than he does from the actual action.

It helps make it hotter when he looks at their faces in the mirror. Reflected in the mirror, seeing only blurred images without the aid of his glasses, he can still see that all is as it ought to be, with Marcus’s face turned away, with his hair disarrayed, it resembles nothing so much as Patrick on his back. There’s a dizzying feel to it, an upending of the existing world, where he can’t tell which of them he is. According to the mirror he’s fucking against himself, and it looks to be going pretty well. He sets his teeth to Marcus, sharp scrape of them angled into Marcus’s shoulder into the same slightly underdeveloped anterior deltoid that he’s worked so hard on fixing himself. Perils of a desk job, they’ve been shaped the same way. There’s nothing much to get a grip on except with his teeth, slick slide of their flesh otherwise, but he’s an expert at making do.

Patrick’s cock is still a little damp from Marcus’s mouth, and it makes the slide easier, pair of them a matched set really, Marcus’s skin hot against his own, and his hands touching now, strong press of his fingers into the small of Patrick’s back, urging him nearer. There’s a shudder at the base of Patrick’s spine where Marcus’s left hand grips, near enough his ass that he can imagine a momentary slip, a sharp needle-thought in his mind that lances through to his dick, and he thrusts forward faster at that, pulls back further so he can get the full long slide up beside Marcus’s dick, some proper friction. It’s just about enough, Marcus’s hand between them as well now, and if Patrick wanted, he could open his mouth, bite down hard on the tender vulnerable space of Marcus’s neck and nip right through that tempting artery, continue this pseudo-fuck amongst a hail of red rain. 

It’s enough to set him off. He shudders against Marcus’s six-pack, comes all over his hand, Marcus’s dick, a reluctant strange orgasm that feels like it’s been dragged out of him somehow. Marcus is still hard, still bucking a little bit upwards, hand stroking the length of his cock, breathing hard and fast, harsh gulps of air.

Patrick’s doing the same, like they’re engaged in a tacit competition of who will get the most of the room’s supply of oxygen. The look that crawls over Marcus’s face feels like he’s been scuffling inside Patrick’s chest for ideas, something empty, something cruel, a better mirror than silver backed glass. “OK,” Marcus whispers, works his dick over one last time, slides a little backwards from underneath Patrick’s still twitching body until he’s resting against the headboard of the bed, rolls just a little to scrabble underneath it. He could be reaching for a condom, could be reaching for a knife. Patrick has no fucking idea. 

“Time to close the fucking deal Bateman,” Marcus says, and rolls back over with something silver in his hand.

.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!


End file.
